Comments Off on Microsoft working on unified app store for phone and desktop

It’s not entirely clear why this wasn’t Microsoft’s strategy from the start, but a report from The Verge today suggests that the company is working to build a unified app store that works consistently across Windows Phone and the Windows desktop.

According to the report Terry Myerson, head of the operating systems group at Microsoft made the announcement at an internal company meeting today.

Spotify is an application which has seen massive success across the globe with both its desktop and mobile versions. Spotify, for those who haven’t heard of it, is a database of millions of songs which can be listened to free of charge. The service is also available in subscription services giving users access to much more. However, another service which has stared to see massive growth, especially in America, is Rdio.

Similar to Spotify, Rdio has a desktop and mobile form factor. However, today I’ll be mainly focusing on the mobile version of the application. This, in my opinion, is far better than Spotify’s alternative and is well worth a thorough review.

Smartphones proliferate the market today for good reason. The largest of which may be the fact that carriers are steering customers in that direction, but also because most of us want that functionality. To that end, many of us change the wallpapers, add apps and generally make the device a personal statement. The biggest, and most popular, change is usually the ringtone.

Our ringtones are a personal expression of our tastes. Be it Windows Phone, Blackberry, iPhone or Android, all of the major mobile platforms can be customized in this way. And all of the services would love to sell you a ringtone at roughly twice the price of buying a full version of the song.

There is a better, and cheaper, way of doing this. Ringtone Maker is a free app for Windows that allows you to take any song and create a ringtone for any mobile operating system.

For quite sometime I have been thinking about trying out a photo app. Believe me, the Marketplace has an abundant number of apps related to camera and photos and fhotoroom core seemed very interesting.

Fhotoroom is one of the apps which will help you tweak your images, add styles to it, save and upload to share it with your friends and family. I admit that I am not much of a camera person and so this app is a life saver. And it is always good to have a photo editor in your mobile. Let’s see whether it’s worth your time!

Back in the old days of smartphone infancy, your options for some ravenous digital gaming were somewhat limited; anything more than downloading a basic open-source port of Civilization or ‘some game from some site somewhere’ would require the ownership of one of Nintendo’s coveted Gameboy systems, lest you be relegated to the living room sofa. However most of the handheld consoles of the day were generally regarded as mere child’s play, certainly much too juvenile a pastime for the crisp-suit-toting, HP iPAQ-wielding business elite.

Of course, with the completely game-changing advent of the iPhone, iOS and Android, focus has turned to the viability of the modern-day smartphone as a viable gaming platform to rival dedicated solutions from Nintendo and Sony. So far we’ve seen some rather stellar results, with titles such as the casual hit Angry Birds and the more console-quality titles such as Infinity Blade demonstrating that the phone of the 21st century can entertain you in the gaming space, too. With the welcome introduction of the Unity 3D platform to Windows Phone, things could get a lot more interesting.